Busacca Gallery

This is a carved and lacquered wood netsuke; of an elaborately decorated skull. Hand Carved Wooden Netsuke Bead- Asian Skull. Today, the art lives on with these modern contemporary works of art and can command high prices within the art market. These carvings are produced in the Heibei Province of China. After ivory was banned in the mid-1980's, boxwood was recently rediscovered. Although different in color, it has a density and fine grain suitable for ivory-like detail. A master carver first creates 5-10 ojime designs. Fellow artists use these master beads as a reference for their own carvings. Contemporary Chinese Master-Carvers take up to four hours to make each one. The completed beads are hand polished and waxed one more time to insure brightness and durability. These hand carved boxwood beads reveal exquisite detail,and complicated undercuts. This is exceptionally intricate carving, coupled with the skill of master wood carvers who can create such life like and personable wood carvings. Since traditional kimonos have no pockets, Japanese men and women would wear a compartmentalized box called an Inro hung below the obi,a wide fabric kimono belt, on a double cord. At the top of the cord, a large carved bead called netsuke (pronounced nets-key)acted as a toggle to anchor the inro with the cord passing under the obi. The smaller ojime (pronounced oh-jay-meh, and used for both singular and plural)bead served as a sliding closure to secure the lid of the inro. Since the netsuke sits atop the obi, it usually appears to be upside-down when strung as a necklace pendant,unless the designer strings through an open area rather thanthe hole or uses wirework to correct its orientation. All of the art is edited and chosen by us for its high quality and workmanship before posting. We are committed to enhancing our customer’s lives by discovering creating, and pointing out only the best art we can find in the world today. We Are Taste-Makers, Art Advisers, Consultants & Publishers Of Spectacular Art Stories. Our job is to be intermediaries between buyers and sellers. We are vetting for high end art patrons. We are determined to catalog the world's most exceptional art and share it with everyone.

Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netsuke

Netsuke are miniature sculptures that were invented in 17th-century Japan to serve a practical function (the two Japanese characters ne+tsuke mean "root" and "to attach"). Traditional Japanese garments—robes called kosode and kimono—had no pockets; however, men who wore them needed a place to store their personal belongings, such as pipes, tobacco, money, seals, or medicines. Their solution was to place such objects in containers (called sagemono) hung by cords from the robes' sashes (obi). The containers may have been pouches or small woven baskets, but the most popular were beautifully crafted boxes (inrō), which were held shut by ojime, which were sliding beads on cords. Whatever the form of the container, the fastener that secured the cord at the top of the sash was a carved, button-like toggle called a netsuke.